George Pitcher is an Anglican priest who serves his ministry at St Bride's, Fleet Street, in London – the "journalists' church".

Eric Pickles is wrong: Every vote for the BNP is racist

Watching the BBC's euro-election coverage last night, I was struck by how many people were saying solemnly that new BNP voters weren't racist. This, for example, from Eric Pickles MP, the working man's Conservative: "I don't suggest that everyone who votes BNP is racist. If we do that, the BNP benefits."

That's almost as weird as Mr Pickles's strange performance on the BBC's Question Time. The BNP advocates deportation of British citizens on the basis of their skin colour and ethnicity. A vote for it is, ipso facto, an act of racism. So voters for the BNP are racist. Case proved.

More interesting is how easily and casually racist otherwise ordinary people can quickly become. The 65th anniversary commemorations of D-Day are testament to that; the ease with which apparently ordinary Germans and people of many other European nationalities participated in or gave their tacit consent to the Holocaust is well attested.

It is a source of great comfort that the many thousands of other kinds of ordinary people, whom we have just honoured, laid down their lives on the beaches of Normandy and across France to defeat such an ideology. All it needed to prosper was for such good men to do nothing. Thank God they didn't.

Now we have politicians from our major parties doing nothing, New Labour dithering in its fin de siecle and the Conservatives offering no tangible alternative. And latent racism begins to bubble up among otherwise quite ordinary people. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York warned us about the BNP ahead of the elections. But they were misguided simply to tell us not to vote for them. Far better would have been to enjoin our principal parties to get their act together and offer a viable politics of hope to eclipse the dark underbelly of society.

That's what is meant by eternal vigilance. History shows us that the sinister side of our society prospers when mainstream politics loses the plot. And it's as well to recognise that our capacity for great evil has never gone away. It's just waiting for some room to fill.